


Sleepwalker

by TurtleTotem



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: M/M, Pre-X-Men: Days of Future Past, Solitary Confinement, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:42:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24807169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TurtleTotem/pseuds/TurtleTotem
Summary: When Erik, in his solitary cell, starts seeing visions of Charles, he thinks he's hallucinating. He's wrong.(Remix of Chapter 4: Hallucinations from one-shot collection "There's Good As Well")
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 24
Kudos: 120
Collections: X-Men Remix 2020





	Sleepwalker

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flightinflame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightinflame/gifts).
  * Inspired by [There's Good As Well](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19851865) by [flightinflame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flightinflame/pseuds/flightinflame). 



At first Erik thought he was hallucinating. This pentagonal cell where he was kept metal-blind and alone was crueler than any of Shaw’s “educational” tortures; trust the humans to top a sadistic monster like Shaw without even trying. In the endless silence, Erik’s mind, he thought, had finally provided him the company he craved.

That was why Charles Xavier was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of his sleeping mat, setting up a chessboard.

It was obvious Charles wasn’t real. There was nowhere he could have come from, and no way, if somehow he had found and entered Erik’s cell, that he would simply sit down there and start playing chess. Furthermore, he looked exactly the same as he had the last time Erik saw him in person—his hair in short, full waves, his body clad in a blue-and-yellow uniform. Erik knew Charles didn’t look quite like that anymore. This wasn’t really Charles, merely a figment of Erik’s imagination.

That didn’t stop Erik from arranging himself in front of the chessboard and moving a pawn.

They played chess in silence, and at the end of the game—after Erik knocked his king over, accepting defeat—Charles simply vanished.

But he was back the next day. And the next.

Charles’s appearance wavered a great deal, from one hallucination to the next, sometimes even from one moment to the next—he might be walking, or in a wheelchair, might have different haircuts, different styles of clothing, there was even a beard that came and went unpredictably. Instability was not, perhaps, strange for a hallucination, but Erik couldn’t fathom why his own imagination could not settle on an appearance for Charles. It wasn’t as if the clothes were ever ones Erik would have chosen—he and Charles had always disagreed on matters of style—and he had never had any particular desire to see Charles in a beard.

And then there were the things Charles _said_ when he appeared.

“I don’t know why I keep coming here,” Charles said the first time he returned, after that silent first visit. “I shouldn’t be coming here.”

“Why not?” Erik asked, but Charles didn’t answer, instead delivering a long lecture about chess strategy that Erik did not follow, too caught up in simply watching him talk.

The next time, Charles started off talking to Erik as if they were back at the mansion, before Cuba—chattering happily about Sean’s progress controlling sonic waves and Raven’s hand-to-hand combat training. Abruptly, mid-sentence, he stopped, and _changed_ —his face sickly and unshaven, his hair lank, his clothes ratty, a bottle of wine dangling from his hand.

“Oh, I did it again,” he said, glaring at Erik. “I said I wasn’t going back. Why can’t I stay away from you?” Then he vanished.

After that, Erik had a new theory.

The only way he could think to test it was by seeing if he could control the “hallucination” of Charles. Could he call it forth when he wanted? In the form he wanted? When he did appear, could Erik focus his attention and imagination to make Charles do what he wanted him to do?

No, to all the above. Charles came when he came, without any correlation to when Erik tried to summon him. When Erik bent to his will to trying to make the man’s shirt change color, the only result was Charles frowning at him and absently muttering “stop that, it itches” as he reached for his bishop.

A day—night? how could Erik ever tell?—came that Charles, the moment he appeared in the cell, backed Erik up against a wall and kissed him fiercely. For several minutes Erik almost forgot his captivity, forgot that one way or another Charles was not really here—let himself be entirely swallowed in the tingling heat of Charles’s mouth, the angle of Charles’s jaw under his palm, Charles’s hair tangled in his fingers.

“Wish I could make you forget I did that,” Charles murmured eventually, pulling back just far enough to nuzzle Erik’s neck. “Don’t have quite that much control in my sleep. You’re probably not real anyway.”

Then he was gone, leaving Erik with an incredible case of sexual frustration, but also with more-or-less proof of his theory.

He wasn’t the one dreaming up a companion. Charles was.

“You’re welcome to come see me when you’re awake, you know,” he said the next time Charles came—in the wheelchair this time, grungy and tattered and still beautiful. “Telepathically or in person, I’m not picky.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Charles said, but he and the chessboard both went momentarily out of focus. When the board reappeared, all the pieces were in the wrong places, and most of them were grey instead of black or white.

“You clearly want to talk to me, so badly that you can’t restrain yourself once your conscious mind goes to sleep. So come talk to me.”

Charles shook his head, reached for a drink that hadn’t been there a moment before. “No, no. You’re just a dream, what do you know?”

“Well, I know one thing you don’t,” Erik said with his sharpest smile, “which is that you haven’t forgotten me, no matter how much you wish you could.”

But pushing the issue turned out to be a mistake. Charles vanished, and this time he didn’t come back. For days, maybe weeks, Erik tried to call out to him, alternating between whispered pleas and shouted demands. There was not even the whiff of an answer.

But a long time later—how much time? How could Erik know?—it was Charles who came to break him out of his unbearable blank box of a cell.

Erik wasn’t surprised when Charles punched him in the face. It didn’t bother him in the slightest; in fact, he was delighted. It was confirmation. The opposite of love, after all, wasn’t hatred but indifference.

And Charles might hate him, but he had never stopped caring.


End file.
